HYDERABAD: Congress Legislature Party leader Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka on Thursday described TRS as a political mafia out to destroy democracy by engineering defections.
Speaking to the media here, he said that in Telangana, democracy is being murdered in broad day light with the TRS spiriting away Congress legislators by offering inducements.
He said that though the Schedule X of the Anti-defection Act is related to defections, they are wrongly applying it to the merger to get a stamp of legitimacy on their actions.
He wanted to know whether it was not true if TRS chief and Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao did not call the Congress legislators to Pragati Bhavan and offered inducements to them to switch sides. “We have to stop the political mafia in its tracks or democracy would be stamped out of the State,” he said.
He said that if these illegal defections are not contained, those who have loads of money would buy the MLAS of their choice without any difficulty and become chief ministers and prime ministers. “We will organise a round table on defections soon,” he said.
‘KCR turned you into cattle’
He took objection to the arguments of the MLAs, who had joined the TRS, that they had changed their loyalty for the sake of development of their constituencies. “Does this mean that the TRS government does not allocate any money for development of constituencies represented by parties other than TRS?” he asked.
He dared the MLAs to resign to their memberships in the Assembly and seek fresh mandate from the people.
He said he would continue to fight against this unhealthy tendency and that his hunger strike was only a beginning.
Meanwhile, senior Congress leader Mallu Ravi in a statement said that the MLAs who sold themselves out to the TRS should realise that Chandrasekhar Rao had bought them like cattle in a shandy and it was amusing to note their argument whether they were cattle for someone to buy them. “KCR had turned you into cattle. You are not realising it,” he said.